February 15, 2018

The last line there is: "Even talking about this topic invites ridicule because it’s so scary for most men (and women). Men are adrift and nobody is talking about it and nobody’s doing anything about it and it’s killing us."

They still cannot tell the difference between an "assault rifle" and a legal semi-automatic rifle.

The "bump-stock" thing is a separate matter. The ATF rule should be rescinded - I don't think any legislation is needed for that - and how come it was issued in the first place should be investigated. The ATF is a bit of a rogue agency that really should be abolished and their functions brought in under the FBI. Any time it is "federal agents," the public reads it as FBI, and if they get blamed anyway, they should at least have control of what gets done.

I am generally inclined to believe these guys that do this are "losers", nerds. geeks, outcasts, often having taken some kind of hyperactivity, antidepressant type medication. They don't fit in, and they know it, and everyone reminds them. The basic problem has always existed, now they are burdened with having been told they need to take chill pills and Social Media telling him they are losers.

He's on to something, but it's far too general. I would say that with the ascent of the "women power struggle," there has been a "reshuffling" of the rules of the game.

When I was a boy (in the 70s), the rules were simple: boys competed against boys (sports, fighting, class-clowning), the winners got the best girls.

40+ years later, my gal (Bay Area Gal) has an executive office in downtown San Francisco, with a male secretary (whom we're supposed to call "assistant")

So now, boys and men not only have to compete amongst each other, but against girls and women, too. And sometimes the boys lose out. And this segment of loser boys/men --described as "broken" -- are likely growing in numbers. I think most colleges and grad schools (except the sciences) are majority female, now.

And, this is further compounded with professional men coupling up with professional women. Why date the secretary when you can date a female junior partner? And who is the male secretary gonna date -- the female boss? Fat chance -- women rarely date or marry downward.

I use the benign term "reshuffling," so as not to choose sides. Obviously, in the past, female aspirations were sometimes cut short by the prevailing rules of game, where men were expected to work, and women expected to stay home and raise kids.

Now, both men and women often work, and kids often suffer. Another challenge for loser boys.

But the "reshuffling" doesn't have to permanently break anyone. Ya gotta first understand the new rules, and play accordingly.

We trap boys in schools that are designed for girls. So what do boys do? Well, a few conform. A lot rebel or fail. And a few decide its better to be a girl.

Boys need to learn by doing, not in classrooms all day. Want to learn history? Go on an archeological dig. Want to learn math, run a lawn keeping biz. Science, obsessively build rockets to higher and higher. Learn physics through sports. Train to fire rifles and the discipline to respect their destructive power. Learn to camp and rely on your self, your comrades, and your wits. Train to be both a warrior and a scholar because you want to.

Don’t wait on others to tell you what to do - ever. You own your life. Make it what you want!

And yet, most elective abortions are at the behest of the female chauvinist lobby, Planned Parenthood profits, Democrat pandering, and women's peculiar rites. The debasement of human life through denial of individual dignity, intrinsic value, and human evolution, may not be as contained as the liberal spectrum asserts.

That said, the individual was a known sociopath, who is prone to breaks with reality. His psychosis may have been engendered by a liberal spectrum disorder, by an intrinsic fault, or perhaps antipsychotic medicine with psychotic side-effects. Or maybe he had an epiphany about [color] diversity or Planned Parenthood, and reached the conclusion that human life is fungible.

Until we fix female chauvinists, and social liberals, we need to ban scalpels, vacuums, and other weapons of mass abortion.

Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. Social progress has promoted a liberal spectrum that denies and corrupts both. However, most men and women are still not psychopathic, sociopathic, or otherwise dysfunctional, so there is hope for a reconciliation of moral, legal, and natural principles.

The problem is not masculinity or even femininity. In fact, the solution is a conservation of both masculinity and femininity. The problem is a progressive transgenderism (i.e. divergence) that normalizes/promotes a confusion of the natural state of men and women, which is, contrary to cosmopolitan beliefs, an open system subject to reconciliation.

Its an interesting phenomenon.The US has been full of guns for centuries, and semi-auto rifles and pistols - and magazine-fed shotguns for that matter, also suitable for mass murder - have been extremely common for 50-100 years.

After WW2 for instance these things were sold to civilians by the hundreds of thousands - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_carbineIts what Patty Hearst carried in her SLA days. Just as affordable back then, if not more so, than the AR-15 clones and similar weapons modern madmen like so much.

But in that time mass shootings were very rare.School shootings are a subset of this same thing I think.

Rather than "Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken" we should say

"Deeper even than the gun problem is this: that boys was broken."

It's a problem with modernity that particular events have to be generalized. Then we address some general problem. A kid got so broken and full of hate and whatever that he did a horrible act. It's sad, and that raises the question (not the blame) of what that community could do to make sure kids have support.

Either that, or take those kids and put them in charge of whole countries. Then the media will sing their praises.

Right now, the media are reporting all sorts of accidental mishaps with guns as "school shootings." Like a window on a bus being shot out with a pellet gun, and no one was charged. All so they can dutifully beef up the school shooting stats.

Now one school shooting is one too many and we have a serious problem on our hands, but beefing up the scary stats with accidents is, well, more fake news.

The key is, I think, travel. Real travel, not tourism, and not gap year either.

If you are a low-status male who doesn't fit in, get away from your home town, your immediate environment. Far away.

You'll smooth out some of the rough edges, and you'll lose a lot of your baggage. And you will learn to survive, and how to tame, or at least learn to work with, who you are.

Yep, maybe you'll die alone and unmourned somewhere along the way, but most likely you won't.

Maybe you'll find some sweet girl that likes the cut of your jib. Maybe you'll find some place that you fit in, and you never look back and you never really miss that home town.

Maybe you will go so far you end up back in your home town again. You will look around and the town will have changed. New girls. Girls that don't remember what an odd duck you were. New town. Towns always change. New you. A you with a load of new experiences and smooth edges, and the awkward baggage lost forever, lost somewhere on your journey, good riddance to it.

Christina Hoff Somers, who, among the likes of Heather MacDonald, have been the most important female intellectuals of the last 30 years or so, discussed such themes in her book The War Against Boys. In fact, Ms. Somers published her book less than a year after Lionel Tiger's The Decline of Males. Newly procreative white males were welcomed to a world in which they were seen as unnecessary appendages. Both books were almost a decade after the infamous Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown debacle. Quayle was of course pilloried as an ignorant dunce, and Bergen's Murphy Brown was championed. But how selfishly grotesque is it for a woman to procure a child and then immediately deny that child 50% of his or her patrimony? The notion that Bergen's upper class lifestyle choice should be held up as an example to be followed by the much more dysfunctional lower classes is all the more condescending and insulting. The single-white straight male has been vilified, denounced, and attacked for nearly three decades now. And people wonder why a buffoonish figure like Trump could seize the imagination of the population. A "silent majority" of you will. We are still a majority, after all. Though every major news organization in this country has published articles celebrating our impending demographic doom.

Most of these mass killers are failed liberal social experiments. They are the wreckage left behind the queers, the soulless militant atheists, the man hating feminists and lesbians, the elderly greasy hippies, etc.

One man with a gun could have prevented much, if not all of the carnage.

I don't think any of these shooters are healthy examples of men, though. They seem either motivated by malice (Dylan Roof, Omar Mateen) or mentally unwell. I don't think the mentally unwell guys would have been just dandy and healthy in a different era.

Every comment thread I have seen on Facebook, and I have seen many, has at least two people who respond to any attempt to say the same as boys are broken, mental illness, drug prescriptions, etc. are met with some variation of this:

"When the shooter is Mexican --> build a wall. When the shooter is Muslim --> must be a terrorist, increase airport security. When the shooter is black --> he's a thug. When the shooter is white --> thoughts & prayers, don't politicize this, he was mentally ill."

I think somewhere, someone is writing talking points for these people, or they are just picking them up somewhere on a liberal site.

For them it is all about the gun and not solving the problems causing a shooting. True when they defend Muslims, it is the gun; true when they defend illegals, it is the gun.

We've had guns in America since before we were the United States and we have only had these problems in the last 50-60 years, and before this century they were years between events. I consider it a deep cultural problem.

School shootings at largely white schools? Scores more kids are shot up in the inner cities of these liberal newsreaders, and none of em give two shits about that. Read the books J. Farmer posts, absorb the minimalization of the male. Look to the evaporation of entry level opportunities. Realize what automation has done to the future of work. College graduates mostly typists who use computers to access electronic catalogs or fill in order forms, albeit at a higher pay scale (for now). This will not end well.

Why is it you never see these mass shootings at parochial schools yet so often at public?

Is it a better class of student? Is it a more caring set of parents? Or is it the fact parochial schools have GOD in their schools while public ones do their best to erase God from their teachings?

How about the answer being all three. More caring parents, and thus a better class of student, tend to be willing to send their children to schools where morals are taught. And morals come from religion (where there is no vote on what is 'moral' and what is not. Where there is no 'choices' that none are good or bad.)

We need to reform our snakepits we call 'public schools'. They used to have prayer in such schools. They used to read passages from the Christian Bible over the PA system once a day. They used to teach morals in schools. Nowdays it seems it's all about 'transgender rights'. You cannot even wear a Christian t-shirt to schools these days!

Think about it folks. Mass shootings at parochial schools just don't happen (except at St. Mary's Parochial School in Newburgh, N.Y. in 1891 and Bremen school shooting in 1913!)

Not sure I buy the broken boys thing. Sure, if you take the SJW jive, which is essentially an upper middle-class conceit, as what's actually going on, you could be forgiven for thinking that boys are being sidelined and denigrated. But as far as what I actually see, it doesn't look much different than when I was a boy. Masculinity is still celebrated, in entertainment, on high school playing fields, in the military, and at work. And, except for those who are batting for the other team, I've never actually heard a women say she wants a feminine man. It's not a zero-sum game and I don't see boys being offered fewer opportunities than girls.Yeah, the family is broken and mental health is not taken seriously in this country. But for every troubled boy, I bet there are two troubled working-class girls who will never be treated as anything but human toilet seats because they're marked down as losers and immediately forgotten.

I used to have a fair collection of firearms, before I experienced a tragic boating accident years ago. I can say that we raised two children, oldest a boy, younger a daughter. We were regular shooters as they grew up, starting with the usual .22s, then moving up the scale. Took the kids school friends out to the range if their parents agreed. None were lost to firearms. Heroin took at least one, and a traffic accident may mask another. We're moving toward our 30th wedding anniversary, the two tragic casualties were not so blessed with such stability. I try to draw conclusions from personal experience, so I think the destruction of the middle class family is mostly to blame. Most of these shooters aren't necessarily poor, the victimized schools are in solidly middle class areas. You don't see this in Trenton, Baltimore, or DC schools, but in Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland. We have generation of disassociated young men with some means, yet no grounding.

Each of these shooters is an individual and should be treated as such. I'm willing to bet that this kid was in special ed and furthermore in the Severely Emotionally Disturbed program. Then they kicked him out of school and left him to drift until he acted on his rage.

"But for every troubled boy, I bet there are two troubled working-class girls who will never be treated as anything but human toilet seats because they're marked down as losers and immediately forgotten."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

They're marked down as marketing opportunities.

This was the first link that came up via search. It's old, but I've recently read that this sorta percentage is still correct. I'm too lazy to look more:

About the only thing we know for certain at this point is that "broken boy" is a very good description of Nikolas Cruz. Myiq2xu has a point. Society needs manly men around for more than just opening jelly jars taking out the trash and mowing the law once a week each summer. Young men need role models.

Beyond that there is very little that we do know for certain about the Parkland shooting. For reasons that escape logic a white supremacy group attempted to claim Cruz as a member, but police say that he wasn't. At 19 he was old enough to legally purchase a rifle in Florida, though not a handgun. Apparently he did not have a handgun on his person, however. Cruz used smoke grenades to help sow confusion; I don't understand why they're legal to own in Florida or anyplace else.

Most of these shooters aren't necessarily poor, the victimized schools are in solidly middle class areas.

Places where there are distinct and sharp lines between the winners and the losers. Places where the traditional roles are being challenged/attacked. Places where there is little experience with real violence.

You don't see this in Trenton, Baltimore, or DC schools, but in Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland.

First of all these places have no clear winners and losers. When everyone loses, no one loses. Secondly these neighborhoods are usually dominated by traditional gender roles. places where death and violence is well understood.

But for every troubled boy, I bet there are two troubled working-class girls who will never be treated as anything but human toilet seats because they're marked down as losers and immediately forgotten.

Those girls are our baby mamas with multiple children by multiple fathers, being supported by either the fathers or the government. Troubled males like Cruz are just left to drift.

I think the culture in our media, and many universities, is anti-male.

Some boys respond by seeking a sex-change, so they can fix the bad and make it go away.

Other boys respond with anger and violence and lash out at society.

I think the anti-male rhetoric in our media and our schools is a serious problem. That's why we're seeing a rise in school shootings--which didn't exist 40 years ago--and a rise in young boys who think they ought to be girls (ditto).

I’ve been travelling in India down the Bangladesh border for the last couple of days. In this particular area, it’s almost a zero technology agricultural land of plenty, reliant on highly traditional roles and values. If those were interfered with, chaos would be a heartbeat away. We have the luxury of a fat margin of error: the next meal is coming, guaranteed. This disguises the insanity.

@Buwaya - We used to HAVE GUNS AT SCHOOL. We could KEEP THEM IN OUR LOCKERS. This was considered normal. In 1966, when Charles Whitman went berserk, students ran and got their rifles at the University of Texas AND RETURNED FIRE!!

Someone upthread noted that the problem seems identified with post war america. The cases of spree killings before the 30s may have happened from time to time but were rarer. I wont dispute the point because i am ignorant to the specific stats

Before the first war, (1870-1910?) I seem to recall there were dozens of attempts on euro royalty and to some extent the same towards societal leaders in NA under the general anarchy banner. Maybe different eras attract minds which are disturbed in such ways to do the violent acts as are "culturally relevant" to the times (in their own minds). A spree killer at the mall is 2000 is akin to the anarchist who waits and waits by the train to vienna for the right aristocrat in the 1880s.

Before the 18th/19th century, society had marginal spaces where possibly the violent and psychotic could stay alive beyond the reach of the law and from time to time make victims of those who unluckily wandered into their domain. Pirates and bandits so to speak, who could maybe not kill every day but would as they thought necessary, for whatever ends, without bringing the law after them at full throttle. Again - what was the recognized "option" for such minds? Go Work in the fields?

Not many marginal places to go in 2018 in NA if you are of that violent mental vein. So maybe you obsess and finally pop and go out with a big bang.

I leave aside the fact that previous eras may also have gotten rid of their era's potential spree killers through swift punishment at the first sign of lawlessness, with imprisonment or fall into destitution in the gutter resulting.

Sounds echo inside a building. You should be inside the NRA range when every lane has someone shooting. And you if you can't see the shooter because of the smoke, you could very well wind up running into danger instead of away from him.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...There are broken boys all over the planet. Only here do they have such ready access to weapons of moderate destruction.

This is more than stupid.

Two goats gets you a fully automatic AK in Afghanistan.

The kid used a straw purchaser. Almost no people are even ever charged with that crime even though the law is already there. Take whatever jackass in that shithead group who bought him a gun and give him 20 years to write cautionary tales about buying guns for other people.

ARM like most totalitarians wants to disarm people he disagrees with so his buddies can beat them up.

You can keep beating the gun control drum even though it hasn't worked for 50 years. Even if you think it will work, if you actually wanted to solve the problem of mass murder you should try something else. When half the electorate won't listen, you need to be creative in finding other solutions.

Otherwise it seems like you don't care about mass murder, just about guns.

And, this is especially dangerous. If a loser dude trades in his sex doll for a gun, only bad things result.

OTOH, the dude who picked up the gal donkey while ditching an AK is less restless. And, if the previous ass owner is nearby, maybe he visits, at night (on the DL), so all is well.

Anywho, rather than the CIA paying for mercenaries:https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/iraq-afghanistan-contractor-pentagon-obama/495731/we should just send over a bunch of gal donkeys.

Or, to make PETA happy, lets send over several million Fleshlights and/or RealDolls. Not to mention FedExing such to Florida and the rest of the US.. Let's get real, the thing young dudes got that's broken is some version of the same thing everywhere. No game. Just make sure there's some backdoor options. For the homos.

There is a similar comment about "rape culture", presumably to rationalize female chauvinists' abortion rites. Curiously, there wasn't a similar judgment about social liberalism, that cost the world trillions of dollars to address dysfunctional relationships, broken families, STDs, and specifically HIV communicability among male transgenders.

It seems that every time a diversitist, a psychotic, illegal alien, or transsocial causes injury or abortion, the left celebrates their transhuman religion that denies agency to women, denies individual dignity, personal choice, civil rights, and lives deemed unworthy, inconvenient, or profitable.

Was this guy a known risk? Did he pass the background check? Did he benefit from a "fast and furious"-type operation designed to deprive Americans of civil rights? Did he commit abortion and assume possession? Was security distracted by the DNC's cover-up of their foreign collusion and progressive effort to disenfranchise American citizens, including denying the Democrat nomination to the Jew? Was he influenced by the Pro-Choice Church, twilight faith, socially liberal culture, [color] diversity, and other policies that deny value and dignity, respectively?

Right, the libtards want to (literally) disarm backward hicks (or whatever it is that is the PC term is for 'backward hicks' e.g., 'real-Americans-from-the-heartland-who-are-shit-on-by-the-librul-coastal-elites').

OT, but not really. I stopped watching live NBC coverage of the Olympics tonight after giving it several nights. Why? I realized that the coverage was hopelessly biased towards featuring women and women's achievements. The network spent umpteen hours building up false hopes for the American women's slalom skier while completely ignoring the poor Austrian who broke his neck. Has anyone heard a peep from Red Gerard? Instead, the network floods commercials featuring Chloe Kim. Just now, the network is promoting male ice skating with Johnny Weir, that paradigm of masculinity.

Right, the libtards want to (literally) disarm backward hicks (or whatever it is that is the PC term is for 'backward hicks' e.g., 'real-Americans-from-the-heartland-who-are-shit-on-by-the-librul-coastal-elites').

It's cool that you, and many others, think this sorta thing.

Fun times.

Zero policy proscriptions that would actually solve the problem.

Unexpectedly.

You have nothing.

I would like to propose that since 90+% of gun violence is committed by democrat voters that we stop allowing democrat voters to have guns.

I am joking, mostly. But it would do more to stop gun crime/violence than anything you have proposed.

Watching the Parkland school evacuation, it seems to me that the observation herein about boys should be applied. If efforts are made to first separate the students by gender might speed up the exodus and care for safety needed using the rule - "Only males are mass shooters." And then all we have to do is keep the clowns from pulling a Bill Murray "Quick Change."

Look, if the Dunbocrats are unwilling to disarm inner city gang members who are in possession of illegally acquired weaponry, including AK47s with full automatic capability, then there is no point to suggesting that they sincerely wish to reduce gun violence. They only want to take guns away from honest citizens, for reasons we can only guess at.

@chicklit, Shiffren has only been off the podium four times in, like, forever. But there’s a norovirus running around the Olympic Village and she did puke before each run. Nerves? She’s had them before. But if she does have a stomach bug then fourth is pretty good.

So, do I think it's reasonable to outlaw a particular gun that seems to appeal to school shooters (not to mention Las Vegas) and non-dangerous (tiny dick?) people who like jabbering about guns (all five of my friends have showed me their guns and talked about the mods they made (or paid a custom gunsmith to make) cause that seems to advance their psychological contentment)?

No. Logistically, the horse is already outa the barn. There's too many out there already and, as Virginia showed, there are other options anyway.

I'd rather make it a lot hard for people to have any guns, incl the Virginia Asian and the Florida White both of which showed plenty of signs of nuts-ness. Likewise re everyone else, even those w/o showing signs of being a nut. I'd like to put real teeth into "well regulated," generally speaking. Let's F-ing regulate. If we're gonna give up on the militia requirement, even though it's strictly constructionist-y to keep that limitation, let's at least keep the Well Regulated part! That's a compromise.

If big-pharma could invent a pill to correct tiny-dick, then the gun fans who are compensating would be sated, and then only the hunters and folks w/ real needs (e.g. cops dealing w/ criminals who break gun laws, and normal civilians living in dangerous places or under some other real threat) would be packing, and they'd only pack what fit the bill. Sure, this would be bad for the industries that fund the NRA's lobbying and depend on tiny dicks. But, the NRA (aka the tiny dick compensation association) funders could make even more dough by selling dick enlargement pills. Or, they could make dough selling big pickup trucks. The sky is the limit re tiny-dick-angst redirection.

We can't let these little dick-ers run policy anymore. Doing so is to upturn evolution. Weak, little dicks = failure, as the big guy upstairs intended. Let the well endowed reign, and those packing little-cocks should make peace w/ their inferiority. No firearm is gonna make yur dick grow. But, this is the 21st century so surely a pill could.

@ Mike: The relative coverage of Red Gerard vs. Chloe Kim is a tell. Same age, 17, yet Kim is already featured in commercials. Girls are already copying her pink hair. Which athlete has a better life story? Gerard rates a disparaging comment from Althouse a couple days ago; I think she’s been silent on on Kim, but I no longer read here like I used to do.

I don't go with the too many out there logic. Most of these killers are not sitting on a long held inventory when they go off. It's like law enforcement. Every obstacle to crime has incremental benefit. No getting around the anomalous record of US in first world.

I think I disagree with a lot of what he's saying, but I respect that he's saying what he believes regardless of whether it abides by the rules of his circle.

I think his views are formed by that circle, but at least he's willing to take the train of thought where it goes, rather than keeping it within the confines of where its originators planned to keep it.

Also, the extremely short-lived show Stella he did with Michael Showalter and David Wain was, when it worked, one of the most hilarious things I've seen.

TestTube said...The key is, I think, travel. Real travel, not tourism, and not gap year either.

On all my lines of ancestry, I have to back 5 generations to find someone, male or female, who died within 50 miles of where they born. Most in different states. Yet, from one 6th generation ancestor in Virginia, I recently read an online article that now distant relatives from that same ancestor still occupy the same ancestral house he lived in. Modernized somewhat... but the same house. Why did my ancestors from that common ancestor move and their ancestors stay, literally, at home for 5 generation? AFAIK, my closest blood relative within 3 generations lives more than 200 miles from me. In the small town I live in now, well over half the town is related to each other by marriage or blood within 3 jumps.

America, moreso than any other nation, is a place where you can be restless and move, and be fully accepted as a member of the local community wherever you land. (Well, maybe not in some small New England towns...) You simply have to prove yourself and make an effort to join in. Become a volunteer fireman, join the American Legion or VFW or Grange, or whatever other local community group is active in town. (I'm a Boy Scout leader and VFW member.) Attend a local church, and join their activities. America is a great place to start over. Your past doesn't bind you. What your parents did for a living doesn't bind you. Your future is always what you make of it, but requires effort on your part. This is what I've taught my own children, and all 5 have taken it to heart.

But how do you give everyone this lesson? You can't Used to be that church, school, and parents in an intact family unit with mom and dad kids all taught the same things as far as morality and expected behavior. If the parents broke up, and the custodial parent neglected church attendance, the schools still taught morality. For me, in second grade, the teacher came in one day, closed the Bible sitting on the lectern, where it had been for probably generations, and placed it on a shelf, never again to be opened in a public school. My children were taught the Five Pillars of islam in school, but not the Ten Commandments. When I attempted to get a rational explanation fo this from a public school teacher, well, they needed to be taught the Five Pillars of islam so they could understand muslims and their beliefs, but telling them about the Ten Commandments was teaching them religion, and that's forbidden...

Schools now teach what amounts to situational ethics, which boils down to, there is no such thing as ethics or morality, no absolute standards to which one should aspire. And school shootings come from that. Hey, if other people make you feel bad, they're bad people, and the right thing to do is do away with them! Boom! Perfectly logical situational ethics thought. You decide for yourself what's good and bad, and take actions accordingly. Girlfriend or boyfriend does something to upset you? Cheat on them! It's okay, because it makes you feel good. Without an absolute standard of behavior to aspire to, there is no standard. Hippies and liberals may not have liked the 1950's and before morality and standards that were taught in the schools, and practiced and enforced by unwritten societal rules, and succeeded in doing away with them, but replaced then with nothing. Anarchy in human behavior is not a pretty thing.

OTOH, it's only tiny dicks and/or unfulfilled souls that turn to murder and irrationality. So cons, let's not go w/ yur own version of a libtard false equivalence-y sorta POV. IOW, a flower-power gal/dude who's been whoring around the block a bunch and likes pot is less problematic (re society) than a wound-up dude who's into guns, and fussing about illegals and the other stuff that get's all y'alls panties in a bunch.

I know y'all jabber about the libtards implementing some sorta conspiracy to steal power from the majority (actually, re reality, the minority of voters) of good salt-of-the-earth con Americans, as you delude yourselves. But, we've got democracy, so eventually y'all won't be able to voter-suppression and redistrict such that the current tyranny of the minority-vote can continue to reign forever. The reason yur backwardness won't stand in the future isn't because of a minority of the population supplanting yur POV even though y'all get the most votes. It's the opposite. You (and, more importantly, the folks who pay to control your thinking) can't forever override the majority of voters.

BTW, how cool is it that you folks in the minority of voters get so fussy re not being able to continue to control the majority of voters forever? There seems to be genuine chagrin from y'all. Funny that y'all can feel so affronted because the voters' majority POV will govern. Y'all have disdain for the actual majority voted POV re Americans. You feel that you as the minority of vote casters are entitled to control the government of our country. And, yet y'all want to serve a steaming hot plate of shit to the majority of voters as you claim yur the ones being oppressed. Clearly you missed yur era. Yur love of the few controling the many peaked w/ slavery.

The public school system creates mass murderers like Nicolas Cruz. From the age of six boys are under the sway of college-educated feminists, who denigrate their masculinity, refuse to reward accomplishment and stifle their competitiveness. Schools used to have men teachers who could be role models and advisers to boys, but they are virtually nonexistent now. Boys need approval, they need to be told again and again that they're OK. The SJW harridans that populate public school faculties not only don't understand this, they're horrified by it. Their idea of education is to inculcate in boys the notion that they are worthless and dangerous. If you tell a boy he's worthless and dangerous, he will act worthlessly and dangerously. Like Nicolas Cruz

"If you tell a boy he's worthless and dangerous, he will act worthlessly and dangerously. Like Nicolas Cruz"

Now conservatives are in favor of participation trophies. Keep dolling them out to boys so that they feel like masculine winners. It's like Oprah and cars: you're a boy so you win a prize, you're a boy so you win a prize, you're a boy so you win a prize, you're a boy so you win a prize......

For modern masculinity boys "need to be told again and again that they're OK".

A big missile is shown in your avatar picture. BIG MISSILE PICTURE: so don't worry about your other short comings. But, if you, even after the psych comfort drawn from associating w/ a big missile pic, have some self-doubt, they just came out w/ a Limited F450, which is an even higher level than the 2016 top-level Platinum F450 (like I have (but, I use it for toy hauling, not cause of micro dick)). Get one of those. If you still find your self typing words re boys needing affirmation, get a lift kit and big tires for the truck.

If that doesn't keep you from fretting about unappreciated boys, see a psychiatrist.

It would appear that we have here, basically, a problem of "going postal" or Berserk or Amok. I like the Postal description better since it deconstructs the physical look and feel of modern (20th century) high-school-as-factory/warehouse mode. The Carnegie idea of modern education was to prepare young men and women for their future as factory workers--dull, repetitive employment in large lightless cavernous buildings doing highly skilled and competitive tasks such as sorting mail or screws, nuts, and washers.

Guns, or access, has nothing to do with the problem, which appears to be a universal problem in all cultures throughout time. Running Amok or Going Berserk involves picking up knives or swords and having at whoever is standing about in the path of the destroyer. The modern World Book, Wikipedia, has a nice article on Going Postal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal, and a wonderful list of Rampage Killings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(workplace_killings).

France has extraordinarily tight laws on weapons but this has not stopped motivated mass killings in recent years, all of which, when stripped of the political horseshit, are simply Rampage Killings. Structurally, there is very little difference between a disgruntled armed FORMER worker entering a postal warehouse in Goleta, CA, some dude entering a festive promenade with his Mack Truck, some guys entering a club filled with people attending a rock show, and a screwed up kid entering a high school.

Throughout history, social gatherings of all sorts take place within walls where there are security personnel posted at these entrances and exits, and all who pass within those walls are inspected. Adam Smith noted this for a "free market," it is open access to those who have been allowed to enter the barriers about the physical market.

The issue here is actually about fairness--how is the person rejected treated afterwords. A worker, student, or whoever who does not fit, raises problems not simply when they are within the walls, but when they are turned outside as well. When a person is REJECTED and cast aside as DEPLORABLE, they will return to commit DEPLORABLE acts. Guns have nothing to do with the problem. They are simply what is at hand. In my village in south France, a young man used a chainsaw to attempt to kill a neighbor who's truck had offended him. He was restrained by onlookers but the Gendarmes refuse to act because they have no authority over nut-cases.

How to handle rejection, defeat, losing, and other such things are critical lessons in life and society, if you will, has a responsibility inculcating such lessons. This is what Sports are supposed to teach--it is how one plays the game. It is not too difficult to grok that being turned down for a dance, and being gracious for having asked, is a critical life experience. Safe spaces are generated through exclusion, which in turn generates resentment, which in turn increases the risk of an excluded person going berserk, running amok, and going postal.

Israel does pretty well at this because where there is a door, there is an armed guard who looks for metal of any kind. As many have noted in this thread and in others, when the probability that return fire is likely, rampage killing frequency diminishes. Walls, guns, and motivation are tried and true remedies against barbarianism.

Law enforcement was literally handed this guy's name, YouTube account and post history and took a pass. Think about that for a moment. They knew this guy was a ticking time bomb and did nothing. Just like the VA Tech shooter. And several others. Let's competently enforce existing laws before trying new ones we may also ignore.

Let’s suppose that Michael Ian Black is making a good point. Alright, is there an example of this new masculine language or framework or paradigm he speaks of? Is there a book he read that he thinks nailed it? I wonder what sort of man he thinks he is?

Govt welfare has decimated the family. It is that simple. The percentage of single women rearing children is an epidemic. This will not be any part of the conversation.

I know its anecdotal but that doesn't mean its not true. Out here in fly over country, we are awash in guns. Home after home has from 2 dozen, to upwards of 100 fire arms. We also rarely have shooting like this. Males start getting unlimited access to the gun safes around the early teen years. The difference is, these homes have fathers. Fathers filling their complementary role in rearing their children.

If you want to move the needle, incentivize a male, female head of household. That will do wonders for the health of society.

And make no mistake, school shooting have little to do with guns, but is almost entirely a problem of living life.

It's not politically correct to talk about the impact of missing fathers, it's not politically correct to talk about the impact of excessive/uncontrolled immigration, it's not politically correct to talk about the influence of Islam on terrorism, etc. And those are the things that are killing our society. Not the guns.

"If you tell a boy he's worthless and dangerous, he will act worthlessly and dangerously. Like Nicolas Cruz"

Now conservatives are in favor of participation trophies...blah blah blah..."-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, if you are handing out armchair psychoanalysis to everyone, let me be the first to reciprocate!

It's clear you have problems with wholesome and healthy expressions of masculinity such as an interest in automotive mechanics, trucks, firearms, fitness, etc. From that we can infer a lot about yourself too:

- you probably have a body build resembling that of a stalk of celery, and your phony airs of alpha hostility are an obvious attempt at masking your own low sexual market value to the opposite sex. On the scale I'm guessing you are at a 3.

- we can safely assume the woman in your life is probably one of two types:

i) a good looking liberal bimbo, who probably doesn't know you exist or care. Just ya know - she is going to ride the cack carousel into her 30's spreading for those men you love to hate - the guys with the flashy vehicles, guns, and athletics. You hope to get into her pants by aping her liberal sexual values. Heads up - that's going to end badly for you.

or ii) your gal is an ugly, obese she-twink, with hair dyed in all the frooty colours of the rainbow, with more piercings and junk on her face than I have in my tackle box. She hates men, she hates herself, but she puts up with you because you are the best she is gonna get, and is otherwise looking at a life of loneliness with only cats for company. If she is stupid enough to marry you, divorce will be inevitable, and the lawyers in the family courts will take you to the cleaners on her behalf.

In conclusion - you're probably the product of a single parent family, and go to movies featuring strong female leads because you've fetishized your mother in the roles featuring such women. You probably went to a public school and did poorly, and went on to get a fake degree in a mickey mouse liberal arts program from some no-name college.

Summarizing: You've projected your own fears and failings onto legitimate gun owners, you've lied about them in order to justify your own sexual shortcomings - all there is now for ya to do is double down on the lies and start thumping your chest in a vain effort to reassert yourself. Fill your boots kid - we've been listening to idiots like you for 40 years now. No, you won't be redefining masculinity, no you won't be taking our guns, and yes, your fellow failed liberal social experiments will continue to flip out and kill your kids because they won't fit into the twisted gender roles you have mapped out for them.

I may be off on some of this, but at least 50-75% of that is accurate. Oh - and yer welcome too!

Law enforcement was literally handed this guy's name, YouTube account and post history and took a pass.... Let's competently enforce existing laws before trying new ones we may also ignore.

This seems like 20-20 hindsight. How many names does LE get every day? How many teenagers say stupid things on Youtube? What laws had this guy broken?

The real real issue is how a free society deals with mental illness, or possibly mentally disturbed individuals. Who has responsibility? We can't round up and detain everyone who someone thinks might commit a bad act.

I really don't think so, and if you're going to take murder as an indication of melodramatic-sounding boy-brokenness, boys were more broken 20 years ago.

Sure, the feminized schools suck (for the last 100? years), anti-male and anti-white propaganda is common, but as a non-believer in the blank slate, I think most men survive that crap pretty well.

Normal people aren't "broken" by a rather mildly obnoxious environment.

And: the unfortunate incident under discussion is just an anecdote. (I think there's something to the idea that these school shooters on under the influence of psych drugs, some of which have the rare side-effect of suicidal and/or homicidal ideation).

Yes, anti. Machines are very scary things. You should avoid any type of machinery.And doctors. Doctors kill many more people than people with guns. So you should avoid doctors.And driving. Automobiles are even worse than doctors for killing people. Avoid automobiles.Especially automobiles with guns owned by doctors. The combination is apocalyptic.

"How many names does LE get every day? How many teenagers say stupid things on Youtube? What laws had this guy broken?"

-- Probably a lot. But, they were handed his name, his statement and how to track him down... and didn't. Apparently, he wasn't hiding much (like the Scalise shooter who kept a kill list, had left home saying he was going to go shoot some people, was seen scoping out places to shoot people, and no one bothered to say: "Hey, maybe we should stop that guy because he might shoot people.")

I'm willing to bet that this shooter, just like every other one, was mishandled at multiple points the government could have legally stepped in. I'm not even calling for expanded law enforcement powers here. But... they didn't even bother to go talk to a guy who the community kind of knew had a screw loose, who they could find out was stockpiling weapons and had *threatened to shoot up a school.*

My position is this: Before we make any *new laws*, let's find out why the *old ones are failing.* Maybe there was nothing that could have been done here. But... I'm not convinced.

“So, do I think it's reasonable to outlaw a particular gun that seems to appeal to school shooters (not to mention Las Vegas) and non-dangerous (tiny dick?) people who like jabbering about guns (all five of my friends have showed me their guns and talked about the mods they made (or paid a custom gunsmith to make) cause that seems to advance their psychological contentment)?”

Pretty much anyone who wants to ban AR variants doesn’t understand firearms very well. A better description is “modern sporting rifles (and carbines”. The key is in understanding that the basic design is almost 60 years old now, and incorporate modern technology, ergonomics, materials, etc. Banning them would essentially take us back to 1950s technology. 1950s materials. 1950s understanding of ergonomics. Etc Imagine if someone proposed to limit law abiding citizens to 1950s cars? Rotary phones(we didn’t have ubiquitous touch tone yet). Computers with far less computing power than our smart phones that took up entire rooms? And yet owning only one of these things is a specifically enumerated right under our Constitution. The only one that a sizable percentage of the population here want to ban.

Masculinity has always been revered. As is femininity. Yet, 'feminists' despise both. Why is that?

The next time you hear the terms "toxic masculinity" or "mansplaining" take note. These are not some freaky concepts from left-wing nutjobs to be dismissed outright. They are mainstream concepts in academia taught to your sons everyday. Academia takes its cultural Marxism very seriously. So should you.

Gee, another violent young man being raised by a woman. No father to be seen. Again.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS? WHY ARE WE STILL GOING ON ABOUT GUNS?

I check every article about mass shootings for one thing: if the murderer's parents are married. They almost never are. This is the single biggest correlation you'll find. It's not the internet, it's not guns, it's not gun laws, it's not "Violent American Culture." There's something about the dynamic of single mom and violent boy that can go very bad.

There's also media notoriety, but that's been studied. I want to know about what it is about some single mother/ only son dynamics that causes mental illness and violence.

Protocols were not followed, and now people are dead. Maybe they couldn't have stopped him -- but maybe Congressional oversight should find out why nearly every spree killer/mass shooting includes the fact that "protocols were not followed" instead of sparring over gun rights.

Yes, he needs to die. While he represents a dysfunctional segment of society and perhaps--only perhaps!--could have been helped at some point, he needs to get the death penalty which, at least Florida still sees fit to implement.

About the only thing we know for certain at this point is that "broken boy" is a very good description of Nikolas Cruz. Myiq2xu has a point. Society needs manly men around for more than just opening jelly jars taking out the trash and mowing the law once a week each summer. Young men need role models.

Two big differences between when I went to school and today - 1) Whereas male teachers used to be pretty common, men have been driven out of the classroom over unfounded fears of pedophilia and 2) a whole lot of boys grow up without fathers in the home.

Also, I doubt there are too many more shootings than there used to be if you scale for population. The population of the country is almost twice what it was when I was born - you'd expect twice as many of these kinds of incidents.

And they did happen - Charles Whitman famously decided to use UT as a shooting gallery in 1966. The largest mass killing at a school (still) was a bombing in 1927.